Thursday, August 25, 2011

I like the 'slow food' movement a lot, and for a lot of reasons. Slow Science has been around for a while, but I just learned of a new manifesto from France. Here's the link, and there's an English version.

Many readers probably know this similar thing: slow-science.org, but any manifesto that starts out with 'we don't blog' and 'we don't tweet' may be trying my patience a little. (Of course they actually write 'we don't twitter', which is kind of endearing.)

Really, I guess I'd been expecting some kind of organized backlash to the speeding up of everything in research.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Overall, I have trouble buying it.

1. 'You need time to think and for experiments to fail.' What are they thinking about that needs so much time to ponder? And experiments are going to fail, regardless of if you've "thought" about them or not.

2. I like how scientists are taking to blogs and twitter, it shows an interest in openness and communication -- and that they're not stuck in the past. And it triggers conversations about related research that would be more difficult with more formal methods of communication (e.g., http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2039)

3. I agree with them we should think about the consequences of research and using it to improve life, when applicable.

4. I completely approve of humanities/science dialogue.

5. I don't have a strong opinion about quantity vs. quality (in the French page). Presumably your community can tell if you're a lot of junk. However, if someone writes a brilliant thing every 5 years, what are they doing in the interim? I'm not sure it's as simple as 'reduce the focus on number of publications'